The Consumerist blog put laptops bought at Best Buy with a heavily marketed $40 "optimization" to the test against standard editions of those same systems. It turns out running a few apps yourself is, by far, the better solution.

After failing to get a clear explanation on what Best Buy's "optimization" service really affected on a new computer, Consumer Reports secret shoppers purchased three "optimized" laptops and compared them to the factory default installations of those same three laptops. They found that optimization often meant simply removing the shortcuts for the pre-installed software many new PCs come with, but not the applications themselves. As far as actual speed boosts, there was nothing to point to:

We ran the 3DMark 2003 graphics benchmark on each laptop, comparing optimized and non-optimized settings. For two of our samples, the Gateway and Toshiba, performance changes were negligible. On the Asus laptop, however, optimized tests actually scored about 32% worse than the non-optimized setup. We have been unable to isolate the source of this performance change. On none of the three tested laptops did the optimized settings give a performance boost in our test.